In this short biographical video, viewers will gain greater insight into the work made by Latvian artist Katrina Neiburga. The video shows inserts of the artist’s work, alongside Neiburga explaining her methodology behind these projects.
Neiburga begins by revealing to the audience how she became interested in the medium of documentary film, as a form of expressing herself. She had always shown an interest in anthropology, and history, which inspired her early projects that were based on her being a taxi driver.
In the first snippet, we see Neiburga’s 2002 documentary film, titled: “What’s in a Girl’s Handbag?” This piece consists of the artist going to numerous nightclub toilets, asking ladies to open their handbags, and filming what she found inside. The documentary was almost like a social experiement, and Neiburga discovered that all the women were willing to participate in this activity of showing their handbag’s contents in front of camera. However, their cooperation might have had something to do with the fact that Neiburga has been told countless of times before that she is a good listener, as a result people like to tell her everything, which she finds quite strange. In her early work she started with 1 screen, giving the appearance of a documentary movie, through time her work developed and became more poetical, as she introduced more and more screens, this consequently turned her work into video installations, which is evident in her 2010 video installation: “In Reality”.
Neiburga observes that all her projects are based on her childhood. This is clearly illustrated in: “The Tea Mushroom” 2001, multi-media project. Tea mushroom is a fungus, and this is what Neiburga and her family had in Soviet times as a soft drink. She reminisces about how you grew it in 3 litre jars and fed it with sugar and black tea. She describes it as being both a soft drink and pet, because you had to clean and feed the tea mushroom. There was an advertising campaign for the tea mushroom, both in magazines and on TV. There was also a shop placed in the city centre of Riga. The aim of this project was to act against gobilization and coca cola, by returning to drinking tea mushroom. Although, Neiburga was more interested in the people behind tea mushroom, rather than the social or political aspect.
Neiburga recounts the event when her child was ill, but she still attended the exhibition of “Magic Things” horror movie, 2003. When her son was 3 months old, she undertook a project where she drove a taxi: “Traffic” documentary video film, 2003. This was a rather unusual project for a young mother to do, but that was how she escaped from this new kind of responsibility that being a mother brings.
Also in this artist’s profile, Neiburga goes into detail explaining the idea behind Spamatrex, 2005, video clip, and “Music Video Press House” 2009, Light and Sound installation, Sound: Andris Indans. In the “Music Video Press House”, there was 5 screens and 5 audio channels used. Neiburga loves this parallel editing, with its multiple layers, allowing the spectator to become fully immersed in her work. This was the last documentary and anthropologically based piece of art she created. The film mysteriously ends with a fade out of her most recent work: “The Memory of Things”, 2012, personal exhibition at gallery KIM? Contemporary Art Centre based in Riga
